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A pensioner has been jailed for 10 years for the historic sexual abuse of a young girl and boy during visits to a Devon farm.

Arthur Bawden took every opportunity to get the girl alone with him in the farmhouse, in barns, and the milking parlour and carried on abusing her for years during the 1970s.

She was so young when the assaults started that she did not realise that what he was doing was wrong, and was too frightened and ashamed to tell anyone when she grew older and started learning about sex.

Look back at locked up

The judge told him: “The indecent assaults started with touching the girl when she was seven or eight and continued to when she was 13 to 15.

“By that time you had to be more forcible to commit the offence because she had grown older and became more resistant. You took the boy to a location away from your home where you said you had work to do.

“There has been an ongoing effect an both victims throughout their childhood and into adulthood and up to the present day.

“The profound way abuse affects people personally and psychologically was clear from the evidence at the trial and from the victim personal statements.

“You tried to blacken and undermine the female victim’s character. That demonstrates that you have very little true remorse and you fail to understand the true extent of the harm you caused.

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“You made reference during your evidence of the girl ‘making a meal of it’ in relation to the one offence you admitted.”

During the two trials, the girl, now an adult, told the jury how Bawden started to abuse her during farm visits. He bribed her with money and sweets and sexually assaulted her in various farm buildings.

The boy told the jury he had loved visiting the farm but had been sexually assaulted when Bawden took him to work with him away from the main buildings.